Exception is the Soul of Humanity

Recently when we went to our usual McDonalds they had added a new feature - a 2 orders or less express lane. Firstly we were left wondering what constitutes an "order" - but aside from that, I don't think it's (yet) working as they perhaps imagined.

I decided to try it the other day, using the express lane even though the other lines were a little shorter. There were only 2 people/orders ahead of me, and yet it was probably 10 minutes before I was being served.

I think they may need to rethink a few things:

1. When you add an express lane, people jump into it expecting to be, oh I don't know, say FAST. So why would you put the trainee counter staff on that register?
2. While this would rule me out, I think they need to limit the types of orders that can be processed in the express lane, for example no custom items in the order, and perhaps commonly ordered items only. Anything that keeps the turnover quick.
3. Obviously they should put any such new rules on the express lane sign, as presently it appears no-one really knows what "maximum 2 orders" really covers - 2 simple meal deals, or the orders of two people who may order all sorts of wierd, custom items?

Recently I up and created a squidoo lens. There were two main reasons - 1. I wondered what earning potential they could have, and 2. at the time I was annoyed by the domplayer/winzix/zixplayer/divocodec/3wplayer scam playing out in torrents at the moment. Creating the lens was relatively painless, and as I was largely wanting to disseminate information about the scam I didn't create it with a bent towards earnings. Even so, the stats have surprised me.

I don't know what's normally a good increase in stats and decrease in lens rank, however when I recently revisited it I found that I was now ranked #197 in the "How-To & Education" category of lenses, and ranked #2711 overall. These figures seemed surprisingly good given how little thought I'd given its creation (though to be fair I thought it would be a popular topic).

I've even at last glance had 84 outbound clicks from my lens - now if only it was a topic that could lead to affiliate sales - hmm, perhaps I should check with symantec (the only AV link on the lens). And maybe, just maybe I can think up a more saleable topic for a lens.

References: 3wplayer, domplayer, zixplayer, etc on Squidoo.

Our dog shop is now live and kicking.

I’ve set up AdWords campaigns and Google Analytics, approached a few of the country’s top industry sites for links, and waited for the cash to start rolling in.

Not surprisingly, it hasn’t been – yet. Thinking the site needed a good kick in the pants to get going, after looking at some competitors and what people usually click through to us for, I’ve thrown specials on a couple score items, and scheduled a site wide sale.

Now given the visitors to the site (discounting myself) you’d think by now we’d have some sales. Nope.

I think a large part of it is that some of our biggest sources of click-through visits aren’t very good visitors. Our site uses a popular and quite community driven shopping cart software, and when I added our site to their showcase of sites using their software, naturally enough everyone popped over for a sticky beak.

Problem is, we’re only selling our products within Australia, and most of the visitors for that site don’t live in Australia. Doh.

I’ve also been tweaking my Adwords CPC rates – downward! But that’s for another post.

SourceForge.net is releasing a new aspect of their site, a marketplace where open source developers can meet with buyers of a service and do business. And they’ve called it … Marketplace.

Sounds like RentACoder for open source, though I kind of hope it won’t degenerate into service requests for homework, site clones and other nastiness.

A while ago I signed up for Joost’s list to be notified when it hit beta/was downloadable.

Well I’ve since downloaded and installed it, and … WOW. Very glossy. Perhaps too glossy.

Inititally I installed it at work, as my home computer is crap and has no video card to speak of (pre S3 Virge). I was that impressed with the quality served from work that I immediately wondered what the bandwidth cost was. A poke around on their site reveals that it chews a massive 320MB downloads per hour watched, which is a bit too rich for the entry level broadband plans that most of Australia’s 3.5 million broadband users subscribe to.

So I guess I’ll not be using it from home, what with a minimum bandwidth cost over 3 times my max speed. And I can’t really be watching it while at work.

References:
Joost
How much bandwidth does the application use (Joost)
Australian entry level broadband plans (Whirlpool.net.au)
Broadband users by Country (Wikipedia)

Ad4car has come up with a novel method of potentially spreading adverts across your vision for hours more per day – on the arses of cars. And no, not just taxis and buses.

Ad4car matches an applicant's profiles to one of its 
corporate clients, then the car is wrapped in a vinyl 
coating with the company's brand, logo and message. 
"The client might need a particular demographic of 
18-year-old females in the eastern suburbs," 
Mr Delphin said.

So the obvious question to me, is what adverts would your profile suit? Durex, Smith & Wesson, those sprays that help you “keep it up”?

Reference:
SMH: The car in front is a Volvo ad: marketers have designs on your motor

On the center of the front page of the latest Jaycar catalogue there is a warning about people misusing a Jaycar electronics kit to crack Foxtel to allow access to the full range of their digital channels.

The sly bit is way in which they’ve given this warning. They mention that their kit (mentioning kit #) allows access to Foxtel’s full range of services, that the information is freely available on the net, the price of their kits, and that they are experiencing an increase in sales of these kits.

They finish with ”... we wholeheartedly condemn this practice”.

Gee, I wonder if sales of those kits will continue to increase?

20060129 UPDATE

I’d not planned to make use of this so I’d not really followed it up, however there are several threads out there which highlight the fact that what Jaycar is advertising there comes with several large caveats, not least that it only works with certain older Foxtel box models (specifically pre-digital).